What is Postmenopausal Pregnancy
Many readers will have heard of the Italian woman of 63 who gave birth to a son by means of ART, after the tragic death of the son she had had years earlier. She underwent hormonal stimulation of her uterus, which, after the menopause (by definition, the last normal period of a woman’s life) becomes small and inactive, and she used donor eggs.
In theory this treatment is possible at any age. However, most women, their partners, and their doctors would not choose it beyond somewhere between ages 45 and the early fifties. (In Michele’s family, the story is told of her mother-in-law, then a sprightly lady in her early eighties, appearing at breakfast to report that she’d dreamt she was pregnant—”at my age! Thank goodness it was just a dream!”) All the cautions for women in the over-35 category apply increasingly with every year of age. In addition to looking at all the medical realities, an older woman needs to calculate and honestly confront how old she will be when she is caring for a toddler, a grade schooler, and finally a teenager.
